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Wizard of Oz technique for multimodal systems

In [294], Salber and Coutaz describe the application of the Wizard of Oz technique (WOz) to multimodal systems. The basic idea of a WOz system is the modeling of a system or system behavior which is not yet or only partly available by a human (the hidden ``wizard'') and to hide this fact from the user. By analyzing the performed operations, the user's needs can be identified in advance which may lead to a better design of the final system.

This idea is especially interesting for the design of multimodal systems because at the moment the understanding of how to design such a system is very limited. Therefore, the authors argue that the WOz technique is an appropriate approach to the identification of sound design solutions. The whole article can not be reviewed here in depth, but the requirements from the wizard's perspective as well as those from the system perspective shall be mentioned:

In addition, powerful tools for the analysis and the evaluation of the observed data are necessary in order to successfully apply the Wizard of Oz technique to a multimodal system. This has been identified to be one of the major weak points during the tests performed by Salber and Coutaz. Their second result is that ``the organization of the wizards' work requires a lot of testing and experiments; [...]''. Nevertheless, the WOz technique could be an appropriate solution in when the integration of software packages won't be possible due to missing pieces.



next up previous contents
Next: Input/Output Coupling Up: Architectures and Interaction Previous: Intelligent user interfaces



Esprit Project 8579/MIAMI (Schomaker et al., '95)
Thu May 18 16:00:17 MET DST 1995